Infallibility in the Newcomb Problem

It is intuitively attractive to think that it makes a difference in Newcomb’s problem whether or not the predictor is infallible, in the sense of being certainly actually correct. This paper argues that that view (A) is irrational and (B) manifests a well-documented cognitive illusion.Australian National University (Visiting Fellowship)This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9625-

Tournament decision theory

The dispute in philosophical decision theory between causalists and evidentialists remains unsettled. Many are attracted to the causal view’s endorsement of a species of dominance reasoning, and to the intuitive verdicts it gets on a range of cases with the structure of the infamous Newcomb’s Problem. But it also faces a rising wave of purported counterexamples and theoretical challenges. In this paper I will describe a novel decision theory which saves what is appealing about the causal view while avoiding its most worrying objections, and which promises to generalize to solve a set of related problems in other normative domains